Re: More than you ever wanted to know about csv files (Re: to csv or not to csv)

[Morten Welinder <mortenw gnome org>]

Mostly for entertainment purposes, here's a tour of Northern Europe as
told by random
csv files.  (I am ignoring xls files named *.csv -- there are quite a
few of those too.
Also ignored are completely vanilla "," separated files which are also
used in these
countries.)

TL;DR: ";" separation is quite common.  Decimal comma is common.

If you wonder why ";" is so common: it's what Excel does in locales
that use decimal
comma.   Gnumeric cannot ignore this fact.

M.




Let's start in Germany. Here's a list of German doctors.  Note, that
the separator is ";":
http://www.stadtmagazinverlag.de/orte/senftenberg09/Aerzte.csv

Here's a csv file using [tab] as separators:
https://gitlab.lrz.de/ru49qap/paradiso/blob/master/kiva_locations.csv

Here's "|" as separator.  That's a new one! Note also the "123.45 €" amounts.
https://www.smarthome.de/feed/exagon-smarthome.csv

Here's a ';' separated file with "123,56" numbers.
https://wahlergebnis.duisburg.de/Buergerentscheid/05112000/html5/Buergerentscheid_NRW6.csv

Moving on to Finland, here we see ";" separated data in some non-UTF8
encoding.  It looks
like a bunch of names and addresses.  Or maybe it's the local
butcher's price list -- I can't tell.
https://www.graafinenteollisuus.fi/files/149/7_saraketta_09.csv

Denmark.  The Education and Research Ministry uses  ";" separated data
with "123,45" numbers:
https://ufm.dk/uddannelse/statistik-og-analyser/uddannelseszoom/ufm_samlet_02sep2020.csv

Sweden, [tab] separated:
https://panglaodb.se/csvs/f658ebfb.csv

Norway: ";" separated with what appears to be an html header:
https://www.feva.no/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/resultater1.csv